Last updated August 27, 2026. SoCal.Startups is built and run by one person, and this policy is written to actually describe what the site does, not to be generic boilerplate.
If you use the submission form, we collect your name, email, and whatever else you fill in — website/LinkedIn, industry, location, description, optional press link, and any feedback you leave. This is used to review your submission, follow up with you directly, and (if it's added) list your company. We don't sell this information or share it with third parties for marketing.
The core of this site is a directory built from public sources: SEC Form D filings, Y Combinator batch data, and startup news coverage (see About for the full breakdown). This includes company names, funding amounts, and — where a source discloses it — the names and public LinkedIn profile URLs of company executives.
This is professional information that was already public before it appeared here, similar to what you'd find on Crunchbase or a company's own LinkedIn page. If you're listed here and want your name or a link removed, email elbertai2025@gmail.com and we'll take it down — no need to justify the request.
We use Vercel Analytics to see aggregate traffic — which pages get visited, roughly how many people, where from. It's first-party and doesn't use tracking cookies or build individual visitor profiles. We can't identify you personally from it.
Some of the writing on this site — company descriptions, glossary definitions, the founder watchlist — is AI-assisted, built from the same public source data described above. No personal data you submit through the form is fed into an AI tool as training data or shared with an AI provider beyond what's needed to help draft that kind of editorial content.
Everything is stored in Supabase (our database provider) and served via Vercel (our hosting provider). Both are standard infrastructure vendors, not third parties we share your data with for their own purposes.
Whether you submitted information yourself or you're a person/company listed from a public source, you can ask us to correct or remove it at any time — email elbertai2025@gmail.com or use the submission form to flag it. We review these by hand and act on them directly, since it's just one person running this.
If this changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Questions about any of this: elbertai2025@gmail.com.